Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. Thanks for joining again this week. I wanted to give a quick shout out to this care professionals training I've been talking about for the last couple of weeks, coming up really soon.
And I think the registrations are about to open for that. So if this interests you, do go right to the Simplicity Parenting website. You'll see it there.
But it's all about those of us who work or will be working in the future with mums and dads, with guardians, and with kids. Helping them support them in a warm, kind, clear, firm way. Helping parents be able to do that so that the children feel safe and secure as they grow.
And this is a two hours on a Saturday, two hours on a Sunday, and no, actually three. I beg your pardon, three hours Saturday, three hours Sunday. I lead it personally together with our training coordinator, Nora.
And if it's at all interesting to you, anyway, that's coming up. You can read more about that on the website. But over to today's theme.
And this is all about establishing Plan B. When Plan A done work, what can we do to have an adjustment, to make that adjustment when it's needed, and to coach our kids up to do this. Now this is particularly, today I want to frame this for, I don't know, 11, 12, 13, 14, and beyond. The teenage and the latter tween years.
Because kids at this age are really, really interested in their own direction, their own interests, what they want to do in their life, plans they have with their friends, directions in general. And they can get kind of single focused on it. And that's understandable.
It's a part of the age. We all did it. But there's this thing that you want to do, right? And I think it's really important to be able to get together with a 14 year old, for example, and plan an adjustment if things don't work out.
Often with kids, I've used a sports metaphor or an outdoor adventure metaphor. The sports one is often, because I'm a basketball coach and have been for years, I'll say, look, you know, in life we have our Plan A. Like you've got your Plan A tonight, going out with your friends. Like there's Plan A in life.
And there's also the breakdown play. You know, if Plan A doesn't work out, well, that's normal. It's really normal.
And that's the first thing, is that if something doesn't work out, then it's not to become super frustrated and just get grumpy or throw it across the room or whatever. Or just say, that's not going to be my friend anymore. It just didn't work out as you planned it, as you'd hoped.
So because Plan A doesn't work out, yeah, don't give up. Just shift the trajectory. What's the Plan B? What is the Plan B? Now some Plan Bs can be made ahead of time.
Other Plan Bs can be done on the spot. I personally like the ones you can do ahead of time. For example, I remember actually our own kids.
They'd been to a party a month or so earlier, where things had gotten really out of hand. And some older guys had come, and there'd been alcohol and pot brought along. And they were kind of uncomfortable with it.
And the older guys were hitting on the younger girls. And they just, they didn't like it, you know. But they didn't know what to do.
And it was the first time this had really happened for them. So we planned. We sat down and chatted about what their walk-off point would be.
What their breakdown play Plan B. What would it be? Anyway, they figured it out. They figured out that if things kind of got rowdy, they would get together with a couple of other friends and just go outside the house. You know, they wouldn't stay in where all the noise was.
Or if it was outside, they would come inside. But they wouldn't hang around all this, all the stuff that was going on. If it got really rowdy, they were, the older one by this stage was 16.
She had her first flip phone, you know, that could text and talk only. And so, yeah, she would just text me and say, hey, yeah, we need to shift the party. And it didn't mean, and they were pretty sure about this, it didn't mean just coming home.
It meant they would get to, because they said a couple of other kids, or more than a couple actually, as it turned out, were also uncomfortable with this. And they would go to someone's house. It could be ours.
They would work that out. They wanted to work that out themselves. But could I at least come and pick them up? And they would work out where they were going to go.
But they would leave the party. But they would leave as a group so that it wasn't embarrassing. And would I not park my old Volvo station wagon out front of the house? I still remember that request.
So the text did come. And we did leave. And they just felt super successful.
They really, and they had a really great time. We went and got pizza on the way. It did turn out to be our place.
And they just had a really, they had a really good time. So that was their plan B. And that was a, in a sense, a larger plan B. Other plan Bs can be smaller. They can be starting out on a project and it's getting really frustrating.
Or starting out on homework or whatever it is. And to be able to make an adjustment. This isn't going well.
This isn't the direction I wanted to go in. And we make an adjustment. A dear friend of mine who was really good at business, in the business world, said, you know what? It's often the two degree angle shift that you make.
Not a 45, not a 90 degree. When something isn't going well, you shift it two degrees. And you try that first.
And that sort of stuck with me really. The other metaphor that I mentioned, there were two, is an outdoor adventure metaphor where, you know, when people are planning an expedition up a mountain or whatever, doing some rock climbing, mountain climbing, there'll be walk-off points. There's always walk-off points.
And they're literally drawn on the map. So if you get to a point where a storm blows in, there's your walk-off point. And you know where it is.
And you've planned for it. If you're running low on food and you can't go all the way to where you wanted to go, to the top of that ridge or even to the top of the mountain, this is your walk-off point. And you restock.
You walk down. You restock. And you have another go at it.
And I really like that metaphor because it means you got as far as you could go. You've learned a fair bit about it. You can do your walk-off.
But it doesn't mean you don't do it. It just means you restock and you have another go at it all the wiser. This kind of thing for teenagers is super helpful because they don't want you telling them what to do.
But at the same time, the frontal lobe development, the neocortex development, like the big picture brain, it's not really there in its full bloom yet. So we're helping out like this. But we're guiding.
But we're letting them know that there needs to be these plan B's made ahead of time, if at all possible. They can be made on the spot. You know something's not going well.
You can't always anticipate it. Well, that's okay too. So let's just figure out what it is, what adjustment we need to make to whatever you were doing, to the project, whatever it was.
Let's make an adjustment. And in that way, you're heading them towards their direction. You're not telling them what to do.
You're making an adjustment and you're helping them with that, for sure. But it's still talking about their direction. Okay, so I hope that's helpful for you later, tweens, and particularly your teens.
Okay, bye-bye for now.
